Unlike school-aged youth attending well-resourced suburban schools, working-class poor students attending inner-city public schools are oftentimes denied the opportunity to develop a sense of agency within their schools and communities. In this article, the author addresses one way that educators and researchers can encourage young people to…

Founded in response to the needs of children left homeless in Italy in the wake of World War II, Boys' and Girls' Towns have become international communities of children and adolescents separated from their families or homelands because of domestic violence, famine, war or other forms of social upheaval. The towns have been less subject to many of…

This survey was designed to assess teachers' perspectives on student grade level preparedness. Specifically, it examines the kinds of problems that make it difficult to be a good student and how well prepared teachers feel they are to deal with these problems. As has been true since The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher began in 1984, more…

A model is presented for assessing students with learning disabilities suspected of having social difficulties. Categories for assessment are described, including affective status, self-efficacy, social status, social skills, and the absence of destructive behaviors. Examples of assessment measures are provided for each category and the model's…

This article describes a new curriculum for reversing self-defeating tendencies in secondary level youth with disabilities by building skills in areas such as communication, self-understanding, creative thinking, and problem solving. The curriculum, Self Determination: The Road to Personal Freedom, focuses on development of eight skills. (DB)

Describes several instances in which parental comments early in life had long lasting effects on student achievement and self-concept. Discusses the power of (frequently unconscious) "negative imprints," and suggests ways in which teachers and coaches can overcome the effects of early experiences and promote student success. (SV)

Describes the development of a learning profile instrument prototype to help prepare college learners for learner-controlled instruction. Discusses learner strategies for increasing metacognitive and cognitive skills, academic motivation, required background knowledge, and self-efficacy, and reports results of testing that showed achievement gains…

Describes a collaboration between a local youth arts organization, mobile home community residents, 6th grade students and teachers, professional artists, local agencies and businesses, and community members to create a playground and public arts space in a diverse, low-income mobile home community. Overall, students gained awareness of problems,…

Educational psychologists and practicing educators agree that student motivation is a central and often problematic issue for education. Understanding and working with those factors that influence students' ability and willingness to engage with curriculum content and intellectual challenges help teachers increase the likelihood that our students…

The purpose of this article is to investigate the construct of academic self-regulation in Web-based learning environments. Self-regulation will be discussed in general using social cognitive theory as the framework of the discussion. The article concludes with a brief review of the limited amount of research on self-regulation in Web-based…

Self-efficacy is essential to motivation and learning. Compared to students with weak self-efficacy for academics, students with strong self-efficacy have higher motivation, make greater effort, persist longer, and achieve more. Unfortunately, struggling learners with weak self-efficacy often avoid academic tasks or give up prematurely, reducing…

In this article, the author talks about the importance of competence and how to be competent. Feeling competent is pretty important to a person in the places where he lives and works. Competence is also important to kids. That sense of "I can do it" fuels the child's drive to explore and succeed well. However, competence is always a moving target…

This paper takes a ethnomethodological look at a typical Experiential Self-Empowerment Approach (ESA)-using speech class to see how the ESA uses 12 assumptions as background expectancies (Heritage, 1984) to accomplish personal growth in college public speaking classes. The following assumptions are addressed: (1) students deserve "something…

Describes a class experiment illustrating students' illusions about their own mortality (often referred to as "unique invulnerability"). The students received information, culled from actuarial tables, concerning age and mortality rates. The students consistently overestimated their own age of death even when told they would do so. (MJP)

Examines how different internal learner characteristics (prior knowledge, self efficacy, and interest) and different external constraints (learner control, instructional design, and level of control) influence the learning process. Discusses learning from multimedia environments (video, hypertext, kiosk, and other hypermedia) within a schema…